By Eric Jayne

 

I was driving south on 35E in St. Paul the other day and just before I took the downtown exits a billboard caught my attention.  Written in big letters, that looked like they were cut from ancient parchment, was the name “Jesus”.   Below his name, in bold black letters, was the proclamation: “He is the most amazingly devine man.”

 

I had never heard of the word “devine” so when I got home I visited a popular online search engine to look it up.  The first item that popped up was an entry from Dictionary.com.  Thinking that this looked promising I clicked on it and learned that there was a British stage director who lived from 1910 to 1965 named George Devine.  There was no other entry listed for the word.

 

A divine being like Jesus surely wouldn’t allow such a blatant misspelling to appear on a self-promoting billboard, so we can only assume that the spelling was purposeful and the message is accurate.  It’s the same logic we are forced to apply when reading the books in the Bible.  Evidently the tens of thousands of scribes who predate the printing press were guided by the divine hand of Jesus to enhance the texts by adding, omitting, and changing the spelling of words and story lines.

 

It seems, then, Jesus is not only a skilled angler, carpenter, shepherd, and divine messiah, but he is also very talented at removing vines—or devining, if you will.

 

Click HERE for another view of the billboard.